Few people have done more to boost academic standards in U.S. schools than Michael Cohen and Laura Slover, coauthors of a new paper offering a bright vision for revitalizing them. But there are reasons to doubt the feasibility of its proposals.
Georgetown University’s FutureEd project was right to declare that “few people have played a larger role in efforts to raise standards in the nation’s schools” than the coauthors of its latest paper, Unfinished Agenda: The Future of Standards-Based School Reform.
Michael Cohen and Laura Slover, both now associated with CenterPoint Education Solutions (which Slover heads), do indeed have impressive track records in this realm, including Mike’s long-time leadership of Achieve and Laura’s leadership in developing and launching the PARCC assessments. I’ve known them forever, like them a lot, and greatly respect what they’ve done and are doing.
I also respect their new paper, even as I find myself doubting the feasibility of its proposals.
The paper is squarely in the tradition of “systemic reform,” an honorable, perceptive, and ambitious approach that says, in essence, that making any major gains in America’s K–12 results requires a holistic understanding of how the system works and a strategy for overhauling its many key elements in synchronous fashion. Prominently identified with Marshall (Mike) Smith and Jennifer O’Day, this understanding of education reform has been present in the field for more than three decades. The ERIC system summarizes it as “a design for a systemic state structure that supports school-site improvement efforts and is based on clear, challenging standards for student learning. Policy components would be tied to these standards and reinforce one another in providing instructional guidance to schools and teachers.”
Those “policy components” are legion, ranging from “a coherent [statewide] system of instructional guidance” to major changes in the structures and governance of schooling. Included, of course, are academic standards and assessments, but also aligned teacher preparation, professional development, a perhaps-surprising injection of school-level autonomy—and considerable financial investment. With everything synchronized, of course.
That’s a very heavy lift, which is why no state, to my knowledge, has given it a full test. Some have moved a fair distance toward it—Massachusetts, Louisiana, Tennessee—but it’s not just hard to do. It’s next to impossible to sustain. The main obstacles, sadly, are obvious and familiar: the difficulty of reaching a durable consensus over what, exactly, the state’s schools are supposed to teach and its children to achieve; a vast, lumbering, loosely-coupled K–12 enterprise that is loath to change, beyond perhaps doing more of what it’s always done; adult interests that are vested in the status quo; widespread complacency regarding that status quo; and election-year changes (and leadership turnover) that make it daunting to stay on course, notably when that course is disruptive, disputed, and politically vulnerable.
Cohen and Slover know all that, of course, and have scars to prove it. They acknowledge widespread exhaustion with and pushback against even the simpler forms of standards-based reform, while recognizing that “it has increased the rigor of state standards and improved the quality of state tests overall.” They also acknowledge the complicated role played by the Common Core, which has served both to raise standards in many places and to stiffen resistance in some. And they’re honest about the generally disappointing results of all this effort: “Millions of students—particularly Black and Latino children and those from low-income families—continue to be taught to low expectations. And that lack of rigor remains a major barrier to economic mobility and social justice.”
Darn right it does.
But they’re not giving up. Far from it. Their new paper restates the centrality of standards in the reform of American education in the name of both excellence and equity. It restates the “systemic reform” thesis that a standards-driven system needs its many moving parts to mesh. But it then focuses laser-like on what Cohen and Slover see as the part of that system that has been widely neglected but that, they say, may be the most necessary: “the instructional core,” particularly an “adequate supply of standards-aligned curricula” and the “related professional learning” that would equip teachers to deliver such curricula effectively.
Why neglect something so vital? The authors astutely explain that “Most state officials were loath to influence districts’ curriculum decisions—sometimes because the politics were deadly in light of the nation’s long history of local control of education, oftentimes because they lacked the capacity to do so. Publishers, meanwhile, were quick to assure districts that their materials were aligned to standards, despite evidence to the contrary.”
Darn right.
But what to do? Cohen and Slover seek a rededication to standards-based reform centered on an aggressive statewide approach to the “instructional core.” They see this as having four vital components:
Sounds right, no? Yet the very first step of their action plan for states is “a fundamental shift in state accountability systems,” beginning with states adopting “policies requiring every district to demonstrate that its curriculum, instructional materials, professional learning, and local assessments are aligned with each other and with state standards.”
And on they go, citing Louisiana since 2013 as one place that’s put a number of these elements into operation (more with incentives than coercion); noting a multi-state effort by the Council of Chief State School Officers to “encourage” districts to adopt and deploy such aligned curricula and professional development; and mentioning several organizations (including CenterPoint) that are “helping.”
They seek far more of all of that, and in many more places.
But obstacles loom, perhaps insurmountable. Truly doing what Cohen and Slover recommend amounts to a statewide curriculum or its virtual equivalent, as well as ensuring that many other currently-local instructional decisions conform to state norms if not actually replaced by state decisions and actions.
Their plan also entails a subtle but important shift from school accountability centered on student achievement and gap closing to something more like schools’ successful fealty to an instructional strategy. Of course the authors want and expect that stronger achievement will follow—that’s ultimately their point—but it’s no small thing to change the focus from results to the machinery intended to produce them.
Yes, I favor instructional coherence. Yes, I understand that many schools and districts cannot produce satisfactory results by just whipping the troops to try harder. Yes, I’d like to see states doing far more to help. I might be talked into the Cohen-Slover approach if I thought it was feasible and if I had confidence that state-level decision makers would make sound decisions in all those realms, implement them thoroughly, and stick with them. But I approach despair when I watch the fast-changing cast of characters at the helm of state education agencies, the timid, rigid, and bureaucratic behaviors of those agencies, the difficulty they have in attracting and paying for the requisite talent, and their vulnerability to interest-driven political interventions and course changes. I worry, too, that a fully coordinated instructional system at the state level will leave even fewer options for dissenting parents and educators to escape from what they view as curricular indoctrination, whether from left or right.
We’ve seen some states struggle toward coherence, but how many of them last long enough to make a material difference? John White is no longer in charge in Louisiana, Carey Wright just retired from Mississippi, Dave Driscoll is years away from the Massachusetts job. Penny Schwinn inherited a promising start in Tennessee and—well, so far so good. But in how many states would even the suggestion of such centralization of K–12 control not trigger protest and pushback? And in how many states might such centralization amid culture wars lead to bad choices in the curricular sphere?
Great big top-down systemic education reforms surely glitter, and on more than one occasion I’ve been seduced. That might happen again. It’s easy to be smitten by Mike and Laura’s vision, which glitters brightly. In the end, however, I’ve almost always ended up favoring workarounds and end-runs, ways (such as charters) of letting schools escape from the grip of state (and local) rigidities, and ways (such as vouchers and education savings accounts) of letting parents escape from the monopoly.
In a private note, one of the authors insists to me that “The agenda here is necessary, complex, and doable, with sustained leadership and effort.” I’d like to think so, and would applaud signs of the requisite “sustained leadership and effort.” But three decades after the debut of “systemic” reform, and after three (and more) decades of results that are too flat, too low, and too disparate, I’ve grown harder to seduce. And more determined than ever to factor painful reality into our reform strategies. Which, sadly, means (to me) acknowledging that what glitters sometimes turns out to be fool’s gold.
The “tripod” of standards, testing, and accountability has taken a real beating in recent years, following decades in which it was accepted dogma within reform circles. At this point, many seem eager to move on from standards-based school improvement entirely—federal law notwithstanding—but count Michael Cohen and Laura Slover as not being among them. The two reform veterans recently offered a full-throated defense of the standards movement in an essay for FutureEd titled “Unfinished Agenda: The Future of Standards-Based School Reform.” In it, the authors look back upon the evolution of the nation’s stalled campaign to raise standards, and argue that, whatever its shortcomings, the effort remains a worthwhile one, if incomplete. To finish the job, they say, states and districts must pursue a “coherence agenda” that clearly aligns vision, curriculum, professional development, assessments, and accountability systems with rigorous college and career-ready standards.
My colleague Checker Finn provides a helpful overview and critique of Cohen and Slover’s article in these pages, so I won’t belabor the point, beyond noting that I think he’s right that their agenda will be hard, if not impossible, for states to pull off. But let’s set aside for now the state question and ask what’s the right approach for districts: instructional coherence à la Cohen and Slover or what the City Fund’s Neerav Kingsland used to call “relinquishment” (more on that below). To be sure, either one is a heavy lift.
Indeed, improving instructional coherence would be a complex undertaking, requiring districts to smartly synchronize their spending, staffing, structures, and systems. The first question is whether districts have the capacity to pull it off. Cohen and Slover believe they do, citing a recent report that highlighted Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Miami-Dade County, San Diego, and Washington, D.C., as promising examples of districts that are building their instructional capacity. Students in each of these cities have shown significant improvement in reading and math achievement on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. What might it take to emulate their success?
For starters, it would demand a long-term commitment to school improvement, which means a consistently steady hand on the tiller. Superintendent turnover is difficult to gauge, but it’s high in urban districts—more so during the pandemic, including most of the cities in the aforementioned report. We also have in the United States an education system that actively produces powerful disincentives to the use of high-quality instructional materials. And unlike the highest performing systems in the world, we have students that routinely arrive in middle school two to three years behind grade level—a gap that is exacerbated in high school. When it comes to choreographing instructional systems, the odds seem heavily stacked against districts doing it well, let alone at scale.
Relinquishment is based on three principles: (1) educators should operate schools, (2) families should choose among these schools, and (3) government should hold schools accountable for performance and equity. The primacy of accountability and flexibility were embodied in former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s mantra (appropriated from the corporate world) of being “tight on goals, loose on means.” New Orleans was the first city in the country to adhere to these principles, but certainly not the last. They undergirded the previous education strategy in my hometown of Denver, Colorado, which not too long ago was an exemplar of making more schools like charter schools. Although Denver’s star in the reform galaxy has fallen, there are still bright spots in the constellation, and good reason to keep the faith that districts would be better off focusing on school innovation, autonomy, and results as a course of action.
Consider my former home of Indianapolis, where a new CREDO study found that the city’s charter and “innovation schools” showed consistently better results than the local district. To wit, Indianapolis charter and innovation school students achieved growth equivalent to sixty-four and thirty-four days, respectively, of additional learning in English language arts, and 116 and forty-seven days, respectively, in math. Portfolio-style reforms are also thriving in places like Camden and Newark, and on the rebound in New York City. At the same time, it’s fair to be concerned about how long this type of progress can be sustained, as well as capacity and scale (e.g., if a subset of “empowered” schools in a district get better while the majority continues to languish). While Indy appears to be on the ascent, Denver is a cautionary tale that districts may always struggle to relinquish power to charter-like schools without eventually giving in to their DNA, which is hardwired to claw it back.
Weighing relinquishment against instructional coherence—one might say tight-loose versus tight-tight—the tradeoffs involved with each suggest success may be contextual and highly dependent upon the individual district, along with its atmospherics. If forced to choose, I lean towards relinquishment because it feels (to me) more within the limited wheelhouse of what a district can do well. But why not both? Ted Kolderie has been advocating a “split-screen strategy” for years, where a district might prod and encourage some of its schools to adopt and deploy better PD and curricula while providing another batch of schools greater flexibility and opportunity to push the envelope of what’s possible.
In Denver, a growing body of evidence demonstrates the power and efficacy of relinquishment as a district improvement strategy. Still other cities are looking for new ways to support instruction and learning while dealing with the pandemic’s academic fallout and its related challenges. The open question about relinquishment is whether those to whom authority is being relinquished—school-level teachers and leaders, mostly—themselves have the “capacity” and support to do anything better than what they’ve already been doing.
Back in February, Bloomberg’s Adrian Wooldridge published a column claiming that “America is facing a great talent recession.” He noted that, “today, demand for top talent in the corporate world and elsewhere is exploding just at a time when the supply is threatened, as the public school system allows exceptional talent to molder and other countries do more to retain their own exceptional performers. The country needs to add a new strand to educational reform: not just giving a helping hand to the poor or average performers but also identifying and nurturing the superstars.”
It was with Wooldridge’s column in mind that we listened to Fordham’s recent Education Gadfly Show podcast on gifted education, which featured a conversation between Mike Petrilli and Johns Hopkins Professor Jonathan Plucker.
We agreed with many of Plucker’s points, including the academic benefits of acceleration and the difficulty that most teachers have with differentiated instruction.
But we also noted the omission of any discussion of the social and emotional side of gifted education.[1] Having raised four gifted students who are now adults, with the benefit of hindsight we believe that this is even more important than providing such students with sufficient academic challenge.
To be sure, most gifted programs make some attempt to address these issues. Unfortunately, this often takes the form of a teacher with a gifted ed certification lecturing parents about the kids’ high levels of perfectionism, sensitivity, and intensity, without providing them with many tools to help their children manage these. Too many programs also fall short in helping students understand, accept, and learn how to manage the social and emotional issues that they often face.
Our favorite expert in this area is Susan Jackson from the Daimon Institute in British Columbia. She stresses the importance of enabling gifted children to build “authentic peer relationships.” At some point, most gifted students realize they are different from their peers because, for example, of the greater breadth and depth of their interests, the enthusiasm they have for them, their advanced vocabulary, and the intensity of their feelings.
In the absence of authentic peer relationships, this feeling of being different can take a dark turn, leading to frustration, anger, depression, and in some cases, a growing lack of empathy for students who are less talented.
In extreme cases, this can lead to violence. An article in Education Week once noted that, “as experts put together the patterns and profiles associated with mass shootings, one element emerges time and again: intelligence. It takes a great deal of methodological planning to execute violence of this magnitude. It also takes a social-emotional imbalance that results from isolation, insecurity, and anxiety.”
On the podcast, Plucker noted that research has found that the incremental academic benefits from attending a selective high school are minimal for gifted students. What he didn’t say was that the incremental social and emotional benefits from forming authentic peer relationships at such schools are almost certainly very large.
Jackson stresses that, ideally, these relationships should span a range of activities, not just cognitive ones. For example, the cross-country team at our children’s high school was filled with gifted students, and their coaches deliberately nurtured the development of relationships among team members. We’ll never forget the example of an extremely smart boy who had been eating lunch alone. After joining the cross-country team, he never did again—and he blossomed, both socially and academically. The coaches were former world-class runners, not gifted educators. But they had a deep understanding of how to meet the emotional and social challenges faced by exceptionally talented young people.
Another reason it is critical to address these students’ social and emotional challenges while they are in K–12 is because few colleges are set up to do it. To be sure, many have expanded their counseling centers, too often in response to rising rates of students’ substance abuse, depression, and suicide. But these centers are usually designed primarily to address acute mental health needs, not to teach highly talented students how to meet their social and emotional needs in a healthy way.
These challenges often grow even more daunting when gifted students enter the working world. In our experience, two stand out. The first is that gifted adults often have so many interests that it is hard for them to focus on a single career. In any given job, they are more prone to “bore out” than burn out. It is critical both to help them identify careers that will provide a sufficient range of challenges, and to recognize that their diverse interests can also serve as the basis for fulfilling activities outside their job. The second challenge is working well with colleagues who don’t absorb and process information as quickly as they do. Learning to ask good questions and not just offer good answers ahead of the crowd is often critical to gifted adults’ success in many organizations.
In sum, we agree with Adrian Wooldridge that America faces a great talent recession that makes effective gifted education more important than ever. To be effective, however, it must go beyond academics and focus just as much on helping these students successfully meet the social and emotional challenges they face.
[1] Editor's note: Not everything important about gifted education can be covered in a short podcast. Furthermore, it was the podcast's host, Mike Petrilli, who chose the specific topics on which to focus. Concerns about the omission of the social and emotional side of gifted education should be directed to Petrilli, not to Plucker.
Dozens of states and cities provide “college promise” programs. Intended to incentivize high school graduation and college matriculation, they typically offer to cover postsecondary tuition expenses. These programs are often touted as “free college,” though they typically fall short of full financial support and lead to underutilization and dropouts. A new qualitative study looks to describe how one such program is perceived and experienced by awardees in hopes of understanding how to best execute such programs in the future.
Data come from nineteen semi-structured focus group interviews conducted in March and April 2018 on the campuses of ten postsecondary institutions across Tennessee: three technical colleges, six community colleges, and one four-year college. Interviewees were first-year recipients of the Tennessee Promise scholarship and 60 students ultimately participated. Thirty-six were male, twenty-four female; forty-three were White, sixteen were Black, and one student was not identified by racial background. Discussions centered on students’ college decision-making process, expectations for and experiences in their first semester of college, and perceptions of resources and information available to them moving out of high school and into college.
Through several rounds of analysis and coding of responses, researcher Jenna W. Kramer constructed an overarching framework of relationships and actions that the average student identified as part of his or her pathway into college. The State of Tennessee was the key player, according to student interviews, beginning while they were in high school. Specifically, the eligibility criteria for Tennessee Promise scholarships include a community service requirement. This was identified by interviewees as the main hurdle put in place by the state to earning the scholarship. Requirements such as steady enrollment and minimum senior year GPA were seen as “no big deal” by most students, which makes sense, given that these are typical expectations of any high school student looking to earn a diploma. But those who pursued the opportunity and persevered largely believed that the state gave them tuition money in exchange for the community service work. Maintaining the award while in college required a minimum number of credit hours along with continued community service, commitments which many awardees said likely deterred some of their peers from applying.
Another key role was played by the non-profit entity tnAchieves, which manages disbursement of funds and provides mentorship and other supports for awardees. In fact, because students engaged with tnAchieves before they enrolled in college, they often came to see it as more important to their success than the colleges themselves. Interviewees described the organization performing roles more typical of college professors and advisors. Interestingly, both the nonprofit and the colleges were most frequently cited for their assistance in finding and maintaining community service work. That element clearly looms large for awardees.
With the state and tnAchieves filling the roles of financial and technical support—and with students motivating themselves to study, achieve, and complete service hours—parents and families mostly acted as moral support and cheerleaders. They also helped keep track of deadlines and paperwork completion.
In general, the structure of the Tennessee Promise program seemed well suited to its intentions. It motivated high schoolers to reach college—including many for whom a postsecondary academic track would not have been under consideration without the scholarship—and supported them once enrolled. That support mattered greatly to those without the social capital of college-going family and friends.
One place where the effort appeared to falter, however, was actual financial support. Tennessee Promise, being a “last-dollar” scholarship, covered tuition amounts remaining only after other federal and state funding sources were applied, and those, in turn, depend on family income. Thus the award amount varied greatly among students. Some received thousands of dollars from the program toward their tuition, others just a few hundred. But the community service requirement was the same for everyone. All students were responsible for their own textbooks and supplies—a particularly pricey list for those attending technical school—as well as living expenses. Students from the lowest-income families reported receiving cash refunds of any excess amount of their federal Pell Grants, which they could then use toward books and even food.
Awardees were generally aware of these disparities, and those who struggled to make up the gaps felt the state could have provided better information to them before the first bills came due. They also suggested a fairer means of subsidizing the additional costs, such as separate stipends earmarked for books and transportation, the latter an oft-cited deterrent toward success.
Kramer notes that all the interviewees were students in their second semester of college and thus had already successfully navigated numerous potential problems. The stories of awardees who were not able to maintain enrollment through the first semester would likely show more and different cracks in the framework. But those who did overcome problems and persevere at least this far can teach us a lot. She couches her analysis in terms of the “psychological contract” between students and the various players in the process, but in the end, it seems much simpler. The architects of this program understood much about what high school graduates need to make it to and through college and built a relatively sturdy base on which to deliver them.
SOURCE: Jenna W. Kramer, “Expectations of a Promise: The Psychological Contracts Between Students, the State, and Key Actors in a Tuition-Free College Environment,” AERA Journal (May 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Matt Beienburg, Director of Education Policy at the Goldwater Institute, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss a new Arizona law that allows any school-aged child to use a taxpayer-funded savings account to pay for private school—or any other educational expense. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study on whether a content-rich literacy intervention improves third graders’ reading comprehension.
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